match was played out in very different circumstances<\/a>. Rather than being a nascent organisation, the WTA Tour represents probably the most high profile women\u2019s sport in the world, with its athletes having (belatedly) achieved equal pay with the male counterparts at the sport\u2019s mixed events.<\/p>\nSabalenka herself earned over $15 million in prize money alone last season and has career earnings north of $45 million. Her financial earnings matter because it illustrates the financial strength and raised profile of the women\u2019s game, which hardly needed this exhibition to find a new audience. That also enabled Sabalenka and Kyrgios to play just for pride, but it\u2019s not entirely clear whether Sabalenka\u2019s pride will have been burnished by the events in Abu Dhabi.<\/p>\n
She was beaten which was probably inevitable. The loss of her first serve may or may not have helped her cause, but Kyrgios\u2019 advantage in power and speed was never likely to be surmountable for Sabalenka. One suspects that the difference in court size, with Sabalenka\u2019s side 9% smaller, was likely no more than a distraction and certainly seemed to have little impact on Kyrgios. Indeed, the Australian seemed to be playing within himself for much of the match, which his again hardly a surprise given he\u2019s barely played a competitive match over the last two years.<\/p>\n
So what did Sabalenka actually get out of the match? She may have appeared in a few more headlines than is usual during the off-season, but as the world #1 she already has a huge international profile and it would be a major surprise to learn that this match had meaningfully moved the dial in that respect. That leaves only the competitive element and it again seems unlikely that Sabalenka gained much from the exercise in that respect.<\/p>\n
For a host of reasons, her match against Kyrgios will not have much in common with any of her assignments over the coming year. It may even have distracted from her preparations for the 2026 season and, at the very least, one suspects she would have been better served by playing in more similar conditions to those she will face at the Australian Open.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not to say that this \u2018Battle of the Sexes\u2019 will have undermined her hopes of winning another Australian Open. But it does reflect the fact that both from a symbolic and a sporting perspective, there was no real value to the match in Abu Dhabi.<\/p>\n
Main photo credit: Aaron Doster-Imagn Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The original Battle of the Sexes wasn\u2019t necessarily hugely informative from a sporting perspective \u2013 Bobby Riggs was in his mid-fifties and thirty years removed from his sporting prime \u2013 but it had huge symbolic significance. Riggs had been venomous in his dismissal of the women\u2019s game and was humbled by Billie Jean King, with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2815,"featured_media":89237,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1766,43465,209],"class_list":["post-94890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-wta","tag-aryna-sabalenka","tag-battle-of-the-sexes","tag-nick-kyrgios"],"modified_by":"Jim Smith","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2815"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94890"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":94891,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94890\/revisions\/94891"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}